Saturday, February 7, 2009

Recipe - Pressed Cookies Made With Love!

In these recession times, does one still have the mood to love? Forget about roses which only lasted for 2 days, useless branded bags, cliché couples’ rings and overpriced Valentine dinner set. Valentine Day is suppose to celebrate the love of your life but it is been commercialized so much that one has to burn a hole in the pocket in order to prove the love he/she has ! If you ask me, it is time to go back to basic and time to do things that matter to celebrate the love of your life this year!

I have not found the love of my life yet, if not I would probably bake him a jar of delicious cookies and make him bring to work, so that he can have one of them every day thinking of me. Hahaha….

Ok, forget about the rubbish thoughts, anyway for those who like to bake cookies for your love ones as Valentine present, here is the recipe. Hey, these cookies are so easy to make that I think guys should not have any problem making them too! So, put on the apron and start impressing the girl!

This is a simple recipe for pressed cookies. The flavor of the cookies comes from butter, thus I would suggest using good quality butter for this recipe. You can choose to put a bit of vanilla extract, but I did mine without the vanilla and it tasted good enough!

The original recipe also called for egg wash to be applied onto the cookies dough before baking, but I did not do so. Also, if you think half an egg is difficult to measure, then double-up the recipe. I can barely fill up one jar after doubling the recipe.

Method:

Preheat the oven at 170 degrees celcius.

a large bowl, cream the room temperature butter and sugar until pale and fluffy. You can do that with a wooden spoon.

Then add in the egg. Do not worry if the mixture starts to cuddle. It should incorporate properly if you mixed it fast enough. Alternatively, add a spoonful of the measured flour. It would mix properly.

Once the egg mixture is incorporated into the butter cream, add in the flour. Using a spatula, work the flour and butter cream into a dough.

When the dough starts to form, you can use your hands to work them together. If the dough stick to your hand, sprinkle a little bit more flour onto it.

Chill the dough in refrigerator for half an hour before rolling them out.

Half an hour later, spread cling wrap on the table for rolling out dough between them. This prevent the dough from sticking onto the wooden stick.

To make it easier to work with the dough, I actually divide the dough into smaller portion. If you do not have cling warp at home, just cut open a plastic bag and place the dough in between to roll out. It should be roll out to about 2-3 mm thickness, depending on your liking.

Once the dough is perfectly rolled out, cut out the cookies in any shape you like with cookies cutter! Of course for Valentine Day, cut them out in heart-shape or star. If you are creative, you can cut them into alphabets and use them to form any sentences! Your love one can play a game of scrabbles with them. Haha~!

Transfer the dough onto baking tray. I have lined mine with baking paper so that they would not stick onto the tray. If you noticed, there are tiny holes on the cookies, I purposely poke them using fork, so that air can escape from cookies. Cookies unlike cake, does not like air!

Bake them at 170 degress celcius for 9-12 minutes, depending on the thickness of the cookies. The above are my star-shaped cookies!

They should be in golden brown colour when done! I like how the whole house is filled with butter fragnance when baking them.

Let them cool down on a plate before storing them in an air-tight container. They should be able to last for weeks, if your love one have not finished them by then.

Here are the cookies which I have baked. Yes, I accidentally leave some of them too long in the oven, thus they looked like chocolate cookies or something... They tasted good still... as they are not yet burnt. Haha. Anyway, all of them are already polished off by my brother. He said:" It is strangly additive even though it is a common cookie with a simple taste..."

Well, start baking now, don't wait! Btw, this is a good baking project for children too. Just make sure that adults are around to pop the cookies into the oven. :)

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